I just d/l the DOS versions of these old but cool games that I played on the Amiga for years (wanted to compair them to the Amiga version). The PC versions are, what can I say, Horrible! Did someone buy these when the were released? Did PC owners just accept poor graphics and sound from game vendors at the time? Sad very sad. The C64 version of Menace is even better. Maybe that's why M$ said back then. "We are a business software vendor, we don't do games". And I thought todays PC games
put me to sleep.

You can't imagine how much better the Amiga versions were of EVERYTHING back in the '80s and early '90s. I shook my head in disbelief when I went to work and heard the IBM'ers talking about their machines. Their stick figure graphics and beeper sound effects made me laugh in their faces. But even when I showed them the beauty and simplicity of the Amiga's programs they stuck to their guns. I felt like my buddies were brain damaged!

Small groups of us (Amiga users) huddled together at meeting places and kept our eyes out for others. We felt like rebels.
Finally (in '89) I took orders to a base in Italy just so I could be where the Amiga was dominant, but on the base IBM was still overlord.

I worked part-time at the Base Exchange after Navy work as a Commodore Rep. I sold a lot of Amigas to families that wanted user friendly machines for themselves and their kids without needing a gazillion extras. The Amiga was an inspiration for artists of every type and age. I even did graphics for TV commercials at a local station downtown. The language barrier stopped me from getting too involved with the local people (along with Desert Storm).

I returned home to find the Amiga dead. First Person 3D games had put the IBM ahead, along with much brainwashing.
Sometimes I dream about what things would be like now if the most imaginative and advanced machine had just been accepted.

Even with it's 512k of memory we still can't emulate it 15 years later with gigabytes of memory. The Amiga had an IBM emulator back in the '80s. It worked perfect! I told them that we could have had the best of both worlds then, but they still wouldn't listen!

It irks me now as much as it did then! Today's generation will find out about it thru emulation, just as you have. Then I expect them to be angry at the direction that we were herded into.

Originally posted by RocketMack I worked part-time at the Base Exchange after Navy work as a Commodore Rep. I sold a lot of Amigas to families that wanted user friendly machines for themselves and their kids without needing a gazillion extras. The Amiga was an inspiration for artists of every type and age. I even did graphics for TV commercials at a local station downtown. The language barrier stopped me from getting too involved with the local people (along with Desert Storm).

Wow RocketMack, small world, I too worked as a Commodore Rep, in the Phillippines though. I must have sold close to 300-500 Amiga 500's and about 100 A2000's. I even sold the author of Stricq his first Amiga (an A500). He was still a C64 owner when I first met him.

The Amiga scene downtown was all about copied games and Amiga software for $2 with xerox copies of the manual. That was the only way I could get Sculpt 3D, one of the first Amiga apps I had. No copyright laws in the PI! The Filipinos knew how to use X-Copy well. Then when I went to Saudi Arabia after the PI I expected no Amiga scene but it was all about copied games there as well. That was also the first time I saw a 3 1/2 drive on SNES and Sega machines. The Saudi's had hardware that they sold to console owners so they to could buy copied games. They even had CDTV in Saudi but you had to buy all the originals, no CD-R back in 1993 haha. I hated buying Amiga mags in Saudi because they ripped out pages or colored them in with black markers. They did this to cover up any pics of women, even if it was just a shoulder or bathing suit shot showing off the scanning ablity of the Amiga.

What a shame then that things appear to have gone the opposite nowadays. Amiga is now having to borrow games and other stuff from PC in an attempt to stay alive (ports of Doom, Quake, SiN, forthcoming Quake II etc.).

I'm sure it was the PC which had to learn from the Amiga first back in the years.

And the ceasing of floppy disk stuff for the Amiga means no more guessing which disk was AmigaDOS, NDOS or MFM format, darn it.

Wow RocketMack, small world, I too worked as a Commodore Rep, in the Phillippines though. I must have sold close to 300-500 Amiga 500's and about 100 A2000's. I even sold the author of Stricq his first Amiga (an A500). He was still a C64 owner when I first met him.

The Amiga scene downtown was all about copied games and Amiga software for $2 with xerox copies of the manual. That was the only way I could get Sculpt 3D, one of the first Amiga apps I had. No copyright laws in the PI! The Filipinos knew how to use X-Copy well. Then when I went to Saudi Arabia after the PI I expected no Amiga scene but it was all about copied games there as well. That was also the first time I saw a 3 1/2 drive on SNES and Sega machines. The Saudi's had hardware that they sold to console owners so they to could buy copied games. They even had CDTV in Saudi but you had to buy all the originals, no CD-R back in 1993 haha. I hated buying Amiga mags in Saudi because they ripped out pages or colored them in with black markers. They did this to cover up any pics of women, even if it was just a shoulder or bathing suit shot showing off the scanning ablity of the Amiga.

Ah yes, to this day the Saudi's still sensor everything and if I not mistaken, it's a dry country as well

The pirate game scene (all over the world) was just the tip of the iceberg. Imaginative artists embraced it for what it was. A creative outlet tool at an affordable price.
In the '80s I put together a program called 'PlayBench'. It was an educational tool for youngsters to teach them how to use a mouse.
Using a Yamaha Keyboard with a midi interface I composed the start music in iff format.
Using Deluxe Paint and Icon Editors I created the artwork.
Using an audio digitizer and Aegis Audiomaster I created the sound effects.
Using DigiView I digitized my face and animated it on a cartoon body using MovieSetter.
I put these all together on one disk. When it started you were given a choice of places to go, like a haunted house, out in space or on a farm. When you chose the haunted house it put you in front of it at night. Using the mouse you could point at characters and click once, to animate them, click twice to hear their sound effects or click and hold to place them elsewhere. If you clicked on the door you would enter the house to another screen and so on as you explored all the nooks and crannys.

My point is this: These accomplishments may not seem like much now, but in 1989 the IBM could do NONE OF THESE THINGS! The point and click interface of workbench gave your creative juices a break. IBM'ers spent most of their time floundering in dos mode.
- For IBM:
- There was no windows which was later a cheap rip-off of workbench, anyway.
- There was no digitized sound, just beeps.
- There was no midi interface.
- There was no animation.
- There was no photo digitizer.
- and the color pallete sucked.
- There was FRUSTRATION...

IBM machines were status symbols that sat and gathered dust in the homes of untalented sheep.
Amigas were used DAILY by gifted individuals who saw the future and wanted to change things for the better.

I can't program. I'm no composer. I'm not an artist. But with the Amiga I could be all of those with just a little imagination.

I, for one, like your soapbox speeches. It's a needed reminder of the real glory days and what drove us to the fanatacism that we tend to shy away from nowadays (although we are out of the Amiga closet, so to speak, since we are all here, right?)

To this day, I still get ridiculed by 'beamers' because I still frequent Amiga boards (like here) and talk Amiga talk, emulate, buy games, etc. They didn't get it then and they don't get it now. And it's their loss.

Your description of the program you created jarred my memory of those days when I would use these programs. Even just trying them out to see what they would do, their ease-of-use made it possible to create something on your first go. The more possessed of us took it even deeper. For me, I created one serious NoiseTracker mod and dabbled in a few others before deciding that sequencing was more work than I wanted to devote to the task. But I did create some songs. And I created tons of pics in DPaint (and a few animations). With CanDo, I made a jukebox disk of Depeche Mods, I created a graphical database of movie musicals (including sound samples from some films via Perfect Sound, poster art scans with DigiPaint, and video captures using Live500), I dabbled in some games with SEUCK and AMOS (sorry, my poor math skills prevented me from pursuing real programming), and many other creative projects I can't remember right now.

My friend Carmen/The Tapeworm was so good with creating graphics on the Amiga, he took Deluxe Video and managed to use it to create games featuring his brilliant artwork and animations. One of them, The Worm's Undersea Odyssey was so similar to the Dragon's Lair/Space Ace games, you'd think it was a playable demo from Readysoft! And my nephew even made a stunning 24-bit graphical database of US National Parks (that even Virgin was interested in buying!)

It seems those days of this kind of creativity are just a memory now since the PC world is calculated, paint-by-numbers, assembly line, predictable cack. The only bright spot I see is in emulation and even then, it requires so much horsepower that once again the limitations of PC's and Windows suffocates the process.

Mind you, I do a lot of music recording on the PC these days, but had the Amiga survived this battle against PC domination, I'm sure I would be doing these same tasks on a more seamless, fluid Amiga and with a lot more precision, technology and user control.

Strange though. I remember being around here the IBM and Atari users were the minority. Most everyone who had an up to date computer had an Amiga. I don't think it was before Doom that PCs began popping up in the small homes. But when they did people got rid of their Amigas quickly

I too used to make fun of PC people back then (late 80's, early 90's). I was in high school then and they had a bunch of 286's and some 386's in one room, and they were running DOS at the time. Sure, I did play some games on them too but they were pathetic compared to the ones I played on the Amiga at home! Those block graphics and beep noises were terrible! And yet the PC people dared to call their machines "professional" while they claimed that Amigas were for "gameplaying kids"!

I'm sure they would've been able to make good office programs on the Amiga too if companies would've let some of their pride go and try something new. Technically the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of the PC at the time, it could even multitask and had a Windows-like system that worked better than Windows itself, but craved much less space (could even boot up a floppy with Workbench and let it use the RAM memory effeciently).

Sure, right now the PC's are pretty good, but we've travelled a decade in time now anyway so they should be! But I wonder what the Amiga would be like now if it had been developed as much as the PC has been (i.e spent as much money developing it as they did with PC)? It'd be totally awesome, and I'm sure Workbench would still almost be bootable from a disk but outperform Windows XP easily! Well, I guess we'll see in five years from now, then the PC will be like today's Amiga would be!